Algernon Swinburne is possibly the first unapologetic misotheist who did not choose self-censorship and concealment but rather boldly announced his hatred of God. This earned him much hostility in ...
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Algernon Swinburne is possibly the first unapologetic misotheist who did not choose self-censorship and concealment but rather boldly announced his hatred of God. This earned him much hostility in return, and this chapter documents the reception of his controversial works. The influences on Swinburne, notably of Blake and Shelley, are also discussed, as well as how Swinburne put his own stamp on the theme of God-hatred by offering alternative pagan deities of fertility and love. Swinburne is not only unusual because he so openly declares his hatred of God but also because his eroticized work violated Victorian standards of decency in more ways than one. This chapter contains compelling close readings of Swinburne’s work, revealing just how radical his denunciations of both Yahweh and Christ were and documenting how this attitude was intertwined with his republicanism and working-class sympathies.Less

Absolute Misotheism I : Paganism, Radicalism, and Algernon Swinburne’s War Against God

Bernard Schweizer

Published in print: 2010-10-07

Algernon Swinburne is possibly the first unapologetic misotheist who did not choose self-censorship and concealment but rather boldly announced his hatred of God. This earned him much hostility in return, and this chapter documents the reception of his controversial works. The influences on Swinburne, notably of Blake and Shelley, are also discussed, as well as how Swinburne put his own stamp on the theme of God-hatred by offering alternative pagan deities of fertility and love. Swinburne is not only unusual because he so openly declares his hatred of God but also because his eroticized work violated Victorian standards of decency in more ways than one. This chapter contains compelling close readings of Swinburne’s work, revealing just how radical his denunciations of both Yahweh and Christ were and documenting how this attitude was intertwined with his republicanism and working-class sympathies.

This chapter examines the influence of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry on English Romanticism. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge made public praise of the Reliques and ...
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This chapter examines the influence of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry on English Romanticism. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge made public praise of the Reliques and admitted that their collaboration Lyrical Ballads was indebted to Percy. Thomas Evans based his Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative on Percy's works and Walter Scott collected in explicit homage to the Reliques. This chapter suggests that the faults in the Reliques made it irresistible to many readers who shared an eagerness to annotate and improve Percy's edition.Less

Conclusion

Nick Groom

Published in print: 1999-09-09

This chapter examines the influence of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry on English Romanticism. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge made public praise of the Reliques and admitted that their collaboration Lyrical Ballads was indebted to Percy. Thomas Evans based his Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative on Percy's works and Walter Scott collected in explicit homage to the Reliques. This chapter suggests that the faults in the Reliques made it irresistible to many readers who shared an eagerness to annotate and improve Percy's edition.

This chapter treats both William Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opposition to war after February 1793, and argues that contemporary literature of protest liberated Wordsworth's ...
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This chapter treats both William Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opposition to war after February 1793, and argues that contemporary literature of protest liberated Wordsworth's imaginative encounters with social victims and outcasts in ‘Salisbury Plain’, ‘The Borderers’, ‘The Ruined Cottage’, and some of his poems in Lyrical Ballads. For Wordsworth at the time, it provided immediate evidence that reformists and French sympathizers were under attack from the government. This imaginative involution from external circumstances to inner life is a paradigm for Wordsworth's larger development from poet of protest to poet of human suffering. Looking back over Wordsworth's development after 1793, the most characteristic perceptions and strategies of his imaginative poetry can be seen to have evolved out of political and social protest, as much as from eighteenth-century literary precursors such as John Langhorne, Oliver Goldsmith, James Thomson.Less

‘War is Again Broken Out’ : Protest and Poetry, 1793–1798

Nicholas Roe

Published in print: 1990-04-05

This chapter treats both William Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opposition to war after February 1793, and argues that contemporary literature of protest liberated Wordsworth's imaginative encounters with social victims and outcasts in ‘Salisbury Plain’, ‘The Borderers’, ‘The Ruined Cottage’, and some of his poems in Lyrical Ballads. For Wordsworth at the time, it provided immediate evidence that reformists and French sympathizers were under attack from the government. This imaginative involution from external circumstances to inner life is a paradigm for Wordsworth's larger development from poet of protest to poet of human suffering. Looking back over Wordsworth's development after 1793, the most characteristic perceptions and strategies of his imaginative poetry can be seen to have evolved out of political and social protest, as much as from eighteenth-century literary precursors such as John Langhorne, Oliver Goldsmith, James Thomson.

The Victorian understanding of William Wordsworth was different from that of the modern era. This chapter looks at his career as a poet and his oeuvre. The representative selection issued under the ...
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The Victorian understanding of William Wordsworth was different from that of the modern era. This chapter looks at his career as a poet and his oeuvre. The representative selection issued under the auspices of the Wordsworth Society in 1888 exemplifies Wordsworth’s poetry to 1846. A selection entitled Early Poems of William Wordsworth signals work up to 1798, Lyrical Ballads being recognized as the beginning of his great decade of maturity. This chapter also explores the motive behind the research for this book. The main interest for this book was Wordsworth’s cultural significance during his last twenty-five years. At a time when his creative powers were waning, his cultural significance grew.Less

Introduction

Stephen Gill

Published in print: 1998-03-19

The Victorian understanding of William Wordsworth was different from that of the modern era. This chapter looks at his career as a poet and his oeuvre. The representative selection issued under the auspices of the Wordsworth Society in 1888 exemplifies Wordsworth’s poetry to 1846. A selection entitled Early Poems of William Wordsworth signals work up to 1798, Lyrical Ballads being recognized as the beginning of his great decade of maturity. This chapter also explores the motive behind the research for this book. The main interest for this book was Wordsworth’s cultural significance during his last twenty-five years. At a time when his creative powers were waning, his cultural significance grew.

William Wordsworth’s residence, Rydal Mount, became a place of general pilgrimage even while he was still alive. This chapter deals with the poet's widespread fame and long list of visitors. Streams ...
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William Wordsworth’s residence, Rydal Mount, became a place of general pilgrimage even while he was still alive. This chapter deals with the poet's widespread fame and long list of visitors. Streams of letters, and the increasing flow of visitors to Rydal Mount, confirmed by the 1830s that Wordsworth's fame was assured. Contrary to the general belief, however, his career did not follow a single trajectory from neglect to acclaim. Lyrical Ballads went through four editions between 1798 and 1805, establishing at least the beginnings of a reputation which Poems, in Two Volumes of 1807 ought to have consolidated.Less

Fame

Stephen Gill

Published in print: 1998-03-19

William Wordsworth’s residence, Rydal Mount, became a place of general pilgrimage even while he was still alive. This chapter deals with the poet's widespread fame and long list of visitors. Streams of letters, and the increasing flow of visitors to Rydal Mount, confirmed by the 1830s that Wordsworth's fame was assured. Contrary to the general belief, however, his career did not follow a single trajectory from neglect to acclaim. Lyrical Ballads went through four editions between 1798 and 1805, establishing at least the beginnings of a reputation which Poems, in Two Volumes of 1807 ought to have consolidated.

This chapter begins with a discussion of The Excursion, a poem whose fear of the autonomous imagination results in writing that is fascinatingly, at times tragically, both repressed and expressive. ...
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This chapter begins with a discussion of The Excursion, a poem whose fear of the autonomous imagination results in writing that is fascinatingly, at times tragically, both repressed and expressive. Wordsworth is concerned in much of the poem with time and transience, forces implicitly and explicitly at odds with affirmations about the value of poetry. The Excursion's awareness of itself as a poem is a means of bringing death and temporality within ‘the reach of reflection’. By examining the poem's self-conscious preoccupation with the uses of language embodied in its own procedures, an attempt is made to rescue it from the comparatively low esteem which it has suffered. The second section of the chapter explores the workings of self-consciousness in two poems from Lyrical Ballads, suggesting that the poet's designs on the reader are especially impressive when the poems relinquish didactic ambitions and allow themselves to be surprised by the direction they have taken. The third and fourth sections are devoted to detailed readings of ‘Resolution and Independence’ and ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, respectively.Less

‘The Words He Uttered…’: Wordsworth

Michael O'Neill

Published in print: 1997-07-10

This chapter begins with a discussion of The Excursion, a poem whose fear of the autonomous imagination results in writing that is fascinatingly, at times tragically, both repressed and expressive. Wordsworth is concerned in much of the poem with time and transience, forces implicitly and explicitly at odds with affirmations about the value of poetry. The Excursion's awareness of itself as a poem is a means of bringing death and temporality within ‘the reach of reflection’. By examining the poem's self-conscious preoccupation with the uses of language embodied in its own procedures, an attempt is made to rescue it from the comparatively low esteem which it has suffered. The second section of the chapter explores the workings of self-consciousness in two poems from Lyrical Ballads, suggesting that the poet's designs on the reader are especially impressive when the poems relinquish didactic ambitions and allow themselves to be surprised by the direction they have taken. The third and fourth sections are devoted to detailed readings of ‘Resolution and Independence’ and ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, respectively.

This chapter casts back over the entire period under discussion — from the mid-17th century to the 1820s — and sees it as a momentous phase in the history of reading. William Hazlitt's pivotal essay, ...
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This chapter casts back over the entire period under discussion — from the mid-17th century to the 1820s — and sees it as a momentous phase in the history of reading. William Hazlitt's pivotal essay, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ is used to frame an investigation of the symbolic relation between spoken discourse and the written discourse in the performance and reception of literary texts. Hazlitt's hint that such differences were already apparent in 1798 is amplified two pages later in ‘My First Acquaintance’ when he describes how William Wordsworth ‘sat down and talked very naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation’. The essay is deeply affectionate and elegiac, but not an uncritical one. It discloses the depth of Hazlitt's anger with respect to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's apostasy and his regret that the political impetus behind Lyrical Ballads could not be sustained.Less

Reading Aloud: An ‘Ambiguous Accompaniment’

Lucy Newlyn

Published in print: 2003-04-03

This chapter casts back over the entire period under discussion — from the mid-17th century to the 1820s — and sees it as a momentous phase in the history of reading. William Hazlitt's pivotal essay, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ is used to frame an investigation of the symbolic relation between spoken discourse and the written discourse in the performance and reception of literary texts. Hazlitt's hint that such differences were already apparent in 1798 is amplified two pages later in ‘My First Acquaintance’ when he describes how William Wordsworth ‘sat down and talked very naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation’. The essay is deeply affectionate and elegiac, but not an uncritical one. It discloses the depth of Hazlitt's anger with respect to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's apostasy and his regret that the political impetus behind Lyrical Ballads could not be sustained.

John Masefield's first published work was Salt-Water Ballads, a book of poems which portray the events of life at sea from the perspective of an ordinary seaman. It draws on oral tradition of ...
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John Masefield's first published work was Salt-Water Ballads, a book of poems which portray the events of life at sea from the perspective of an ordinary seaman. It draws on oral tradition of folklore and practical wisdom, those kinds of poetry which might be called non-literary. The book's prevailing mood is one of romantic adventure. Meanwhile, Dauber revealed Masefield was still worried by the relationship between artistic sensibility and the physical world, but here he found a solution. Although Masefield continued to write until his death in 1967, interest centred on his early career because it shows how his pragmatic commitment to literature, designed to curb the excesses of imaginative indulgence, governed his development and because his theme is an indication of the pressures inherent in Edwardian literature.Less

John Masefield: The Homesick Edwardian

Kenneth Millard

Published in print: 1991-11-07

John Masefield's first published work was Salt-Water Ballads, a book of poems which portray the events of life at sea from the perspective of an ordinary seaman. It draws on oral tradition of folklore and practical wisdom, those kinds of poetry which might be called non-literary. The book's prevailing mood is one of romantic adventure. Meanwhile, Dauber revealed Masefield was still worried by the relationship between artistic sensibility and the physical world, but here he found a solution. Although Masefield continued to write until his death in 1967, interest centred on his early career because it shows how his pragmatic commitment to literature, designed to curb the excesses of imaginative indulgence, governed his development and because his theme is an indication of the pressures inherent in Edwardian literature.

The fan letter that the seventeen-year-old De Quincey sent to Wordsworth in 1803 exhibited a certain worldliness which De Quincey obtained from his various adventures and wanderings which he would ...
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The fan letter that the seventeen-year-old De Quincey sent to Wordsworth in 1803 exhibited a certain worldliness which De Quincey obtained from his various adventures and wanderings which he would soon recall in Confessions. In this letter, we are able to recognize the start of an ‘attachment’ which is seen throughout his literary career. As De Quincey moved into the former home of the Wordsworths, he was largely exposed to those whom he shared the same literary interests with, as they all surrounded Wordsworth. Although Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads is often recognized as containing serious political involvement, De Quincey chose to view these works for how they had portrayed feeling and landscape. In this chapter, we see how De Quincey's work bears several ideological compromises and how these were included in various writings during the 1830s.Less

De Quincey in History: Terror and Amnesia

Josephine Mcdonagh

Published in print: 1994-06-16

The fan letter that the seventeen-year-old De Quincey sent to Wordsworth in 1803 exhibited a certain worldliness which De Quincey obtained from his various adventures and wanderings which he would soon recall in Confessions. In this letter, we are able to recognize the start of an ‘attachment’ which is seen throughout his literary career. As De Quincey moved into the former home of the Wordsworths, he was largely exposed to those whom he shared the same literary interests with, as they all surrounded Wordsworth. Although Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads is often recognized as containing serious political involvement, De Quincey chose to view these works for how they had portrayed feeling and landscape. In this chapter, we see how De Quincey's work bears several ideological compromises and how these were included in various writings during the 1830s.